I offer a white tulip to the
white cat on the fifth-floor windowsill.
A poplar leaf, still green,
floats on your black pool at 3:30 a.m.
While he slicks back his hair
behind a tangle of ripe raspberry bushes,
she dabs her wrists with
patchouli under the rising sliver moon.
Dawn eases into the picture near
the dumpsters behind my high rise.
Your lost mirror shades, a
souvenir from one of the bicentennials,
reflect the coppery light and
closed barnacles along the rocky coast.
The suburban local breaks down on
the hottest morning of the summer.
(On the warmest night of the
winter, a misty and amorphous night
when he's approached on the
sidewalk by each person's damaged psyche,
she sits in a folding chair
beside her 93-year-old great-aunt.)
If I pull over at a roadside
vegetable stand in your final county,
he will forget to ask the
assemblage at her Latvian friend's house
about Joseph Cornell, the most
famous inhabitant of Utopia
Parkway.
I'm reading an amusing religious
pamphlet, from Jews for Jesus,
instead of listening to the
cobblestones rumbling during each backwash.
Your lighthouse is being toured
by Steven Fratello, who requested
Darlene Love's "Today I met
the boy I'm gonna marry" on all-night radio.
Among factories converted to
warehouses and shady luncheonettes,
she laughs and raises hell in a
lime miniskirt and stiletto heels.
Overhead, the clouds awaken from
their long nap above the cool harbor.
I'm waiting in the back seat of a
parked car with the windows down.
Your horoscope wouldn't have
called for stoopball this afternoon,
but stickball at Marshall School, charburgers and Napoleons at
Don's.
The hairless insides of his
thighs after sweating. Her brown paper
bag.
For a change, I don't recognize
any of the names in the obituaries.
You enjoyed riding in the front
passenger seat a little too much
to crave the smoky darkness in
the back room of Rod's Cocktail Lounge.
Cheap commercials, populated by
retired Los Angeles Dodgers greats,
dominate the late-night TV in his
mediocre motel room in Encino.
The steeple's shadow crosses the
advice columns she reads religiously
on a concrete bench in Corporal Francis Xavier McGilligan Square.
As gasoline fumes from the Exxon
pump ravish my sense of smell,
chickory and daisies bend their
heads beneath the strong south wind.
No memory of your short life is
too trivial to overlook any longer,
much less the handshake he spurned, the prophetic
postcard to her.
Michael Ruby is the author of five
full-length poetry books: At an Intersection (Alef,
2002), Window on the City (BlazeVOX, 2006), The Edge
of the Underworld (BlazeVOX, 2010), Compulsive Words (BlazeVOX,
2010) and American
Songbook (Ugly Duckling,
2013). His trilogy, Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices (Station
Hill, 2012), includes Fleeting Memories,
a UDP web-book, and Inner
Voices Heard Before Sleep, an Argotist Online ebook. He is also the
author of four Dusie chapbooks, including The
Star-Spangled Banner (2011), and the co-editor of Bernadette
Mayer’s collected early books, Eating the
Colors of a Lineup of Words, from Station Hill. A graduate
of Harvard College and Brown University’s writing program,
he lives in Brooklyn and works as an editor of U.S. news
and political articles at The Wall Street Journal.
